Text Messaging for Successful Clinical Trial Recruitment

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Clinical trials require an enormous amount of preparation. By all means, recruiting patients to participate should be the easy part. Unfortunately, it’s not. Recruitment costs run high. Managing patient information takes a lot of time. And a steep rate of patient drop-outs and no shows can be an enormous setback.

What affordable and versatile tool can mitigate these challenges? The answer is simple and easy. Text messaging.

Text messages help attract and retain potential patients

Clinical trial recruitment suffers from expensive and laborious methods. It’s hard to find interested, qualified patients. Those who do qualify are often scared off by the on-boarding process. Others grow impatient with the wait time. As a result, two-thirds of recruited clinical trial patients will drop out before a study even begins. Text messaging provides a simple solution to recruitment woes by being accessible and fast.

Because 91% of the population has a cell phone, advertising your clinical trial with a mobile call to action can recruit more people than any other channel. By placing your call to action in strategic locations, such as hospital waiting rooms or on relevant healthcare websites, interested patients can sign up for your trial with an easy text message.

Once a potential patient starts texting you, the process to gather information is simple. A quick “yes” or “no” question or multiple choice survey lets you gather relevant data from each patient so you can easily see whether they are qualified or not. Text messages provide an instant recruitment option that allows you to on-board patients instantly, without the lag time.

Text messages can help manage and segment your contacts

After you’ve collected interested contacts over text message, you need to decide who will proceed with the trial. This is another area where many potential patients drop out. They may get scared or hesitant about participating, and your limited staff does not have the time to fully address their concerns. But mobile has a solution for this too.

Our platform allows researchers to organize and segment their outreach based on user data. Each mobile user has a unique profile saved in your database. You can segment and target your users based on various characteristics, such as eligibility or availability, thereby making it easy to manage your outgoing communications with them. The knowledge that they can reach their doctor anytime, anywhere, gives patients a sense of safety and comfort that promotes an overall positive experience.

Text messaging results in greater efficiency throughout the trial

Finally. All your numbers are in. Your patients are ready. Now where do they go? Let mobile lead the way!

Text messaging can be used to set up appointment reminders that sync to each patient’s schedule. You can also have patients confirm or reschedule upcoming appointments over SMS. Saving time with bureaucratic work leads to greater efficiency throughout the trial as a whole. It can also lead to more exact results by guaranteeing that your patients are at the clinic when you need them to be—and not a few days or weeks after.

Clinical trials are just one of the many, many areas in the healthcare industry that text messaging is improving. If you’d like to learn more, get in touch with us at sales@mobilecommons.com today.